emergent msdosfs problems, errors

[Brian M. Kincaid]

Hello FreeBSD Collective Consciousness,

I run a dual-boot FreeBSD 6.0-Current/WinXP Pro system. The FreeBSD NTFS 
driver can't write files, and can only read files less than 2GB in size, 
so I have been using a FAT32 disk (Drive D:) mounted using mount_msdosfs 
successfully for several years for file transfer between the FreeBSD and 
WinXP "personalities" of my system.

Just recently, after some hardware changes in my machine (new SATA disks 
for the FreeBSD personality) and rebuilding of world and kernel, the 
MSDOS file system has become unreliable, with directories and files 
mixed up, and "find ." broken with various error messages. Also, 
fsck_msdosfs complains about bad signatures in the boot block.

After a clean reboot, doing "find ." on the FAT32 disk works without 
errors. Running "tar" to try to create a backup of the FAT32 disk fails, 
though, and after that "find ." returns errors "find: fts_read: No such 
file or directory" and files and directories on the FAT32 disk appear to 
be mixed up or corrupted.

In the WinXP world, the FAT32 disk is just fine, thank you.

All this is new behavior, things have been working for several years.

I think the FreeBSD msdosfs driver is failing somehow. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Brian